TSS People

Rosie Fisher, Scientist II

Short Bio

I am a staff scientist in the Terrestrial Sciences Section working on development of the Community Land Model. My research is primarily motivated by
the potential for the biosphere to generate large feedbacks to climate change, via changes in CO2 balance, evaporation and trace gas emissions. Within this, I
am involved in the development and testing of new methods for simulating the future of global ecosystems and their responses to change. The development of 'predictive ecology'
is in its infancy, and our understanding of ecosystem processes is far from ideal. Dynamic Global Vegetation Models, that attempt to predict the distribution and
structure of ecosystems in the future, are thus a necessary but imperfect means by which we
attempt to forecast the impacts of global environmental change on natural ecosystems.

Prior to coming to NCAR, I was a post-doc researcher with Nate McDowell at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and also at the University of Sheffield in the UK, where I worked on the Joint UK Land Environment Simulator (JULES) with Prof. Ian Woodward. My graduate
studies were at the University of Edinburgh with Mathew Williams, Patrick Meir and Yadvinder Malhi, where I was involved with a 1 hectare rainfall manipulation experiment in Eastern Brazil, investigating the impact of drought on the Amazon rainforest through plant hydrodynamic models and ecophysiological measurement techniques. Our experiment is ongoing (now the longest running of it's kind), and is yielding more interesting results each year. I also worked for six months as a post-doc and canopy access technician for Maurizio Mencuccinni and Jordi Martinez-Vilalta after my PhD graduation.

Research Interests

My interests span a wide spectrum of issues related to the development of simulation models of ecosystem function. Normally, this involves
increasing the complexity of a model so that it provides a higher resolution simulation of the real world. Ideally, we hope to find instances where the self-organizing properties of
ecosystems allow us to simplify our model structure. Harnessing the emergent behaviour of plants and ecosystems arguably provides the most promising avenue for the development of predictive models of the biosphere.
My research currently focuses on the following specific areas:

Projects

I am one of the primary developers of the Community Land Model(the CLM), and have been coordinating community efforts accross numerous institutions including NASA-JPL, LANL, Berkeley Lab, Virginia Tech, to intergrate numerous new representations of Nitrogen processes into the codebase of the upcoming CLM5, in addition to parameter space exploration, plant hydraulics representations, and modifications of the representation vegetation carbon economy.

During my first few years at NCAR, I was responsible for the development of the CLM(ED) model: integration of the Ecosystem Demography model (a size-and-age structured representation of ecosystem structure and competition) into the CLM code base. The CLM(ED) is one of several efforts worldwide to improve the linkages of plant ecology and Earth System Models (ESMs), to better represent the processes governing ecosystem structure, and the vulnerabilities and resiliece of the carbon, nutrient and water cycles with respect to climatic conditions.

The CLM(ED) model is the core focus of model development within the Next Generation Ecosystem Experiment in the Tropics (NGEE-T) a US Dept. of Energy funded initiative to improve tropical forest representations in ESMs. I am a member of the Executive Committee and the modeling co-lead for the NGEE-tropics project, and am coordinating research into the representation of fire-vegetation interactions with NCAR NGEE-T funded scientist Dr Jacquelyn Shuman. After further development by the NGEE-tropics community, CLM(ED) will become known as FATES (the Functionally Assembled Terrestrial Ecosystem Simulator) and will be available as a module for use in alternative 'host' land surface schemes.